Last year, the University of Michigan offered University of Minnesota history professor Steven Ruggles a position as director of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, the largest science data archive in the world, at a salary of $185,000 a year. Here, he was making 90,000.

The prospective deal also offered him a full professorship in Michigan's history department.

Ruggles is a hot commodity. College of Liberal Arts dean Steven Rosenstone counts him among the top grant-getters in the college. He also illustrates why top researchers mean so much to universities: in 10 years at Minnesota, Ruggles has won $21 million in research grants.

The federal research grant pays for more than just Ruggles' work. About a fourth of it goes to the university to pay for overhead, such as rent and electricity, and general research costs, such as libraries and other facilities that benefit the whole university.

Ruggles essentially runs a small business.

With nine federal grants, he directs a budget of $2.8 million a year, employing 65 people. A little more than a year ago, CLA gave him additional research space and a new unit, the Minnesota Population Center. `

Most of Ruggles' grants have been to computerize census data into a searchable format. His work is available to the public, on the Web site http://www.ipums.org/ .

``It's the third most widely used data base in demography,'' Ruggles said.

Rosenstone didn't want to lose him, so Minnesota countered with a 44 percent raise, to $130,000.

``I don't know if I'm worth a salary of $130,000, but I think there is no question that it is a highly cost-effective use of state funds,'' Ruggles said. ``For a net salary cost of $65,000, the university gets an administrator and teacher, over $700,000 of overhead and a lot of international visibility. The state gets a couple dozen well-paid jobs and support for 36 students.''

When he couldn't figure out how to transfer the research business he had created at Minnesota, and decided he didn't want to commute from Ann Arbor, he turned the Wolverines down.

``I knew the counter from Minnesota was as much as it could pay in the history department,'' Ruggles said. ``But the money was not the whole thing going on here. At Michigan I would have been an administrator. One of the reasons administrators get paid more money than professors is their lives are worse.''